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It's really hard to read book length texts I often feel. Even just articles are difficult. But then, while I was on Twitter, I often noticed after reading a thread that oh my, that was really, really long!
Just the very basic thing of splitting a long text into short, logical chunks did wonders to my ability to read what I didn't notice until afterwards was actually long texts.
Sitting here reading a visual novel "game" I'm reminded of this. And wonder if classic literature could be converted to this genre?
There's so many awesome books out there. That I want to read, and more people in general should read. But instead I spend all my time just reading tiny chunks of text on a screen, whether in games or websites.
Could we use this genre to make books more easily accessible?
Has anyone done this? Which classic books should be visual noveled?
The oldest of classical literature is out of copyright – anyone can do anything they want with it. More books enters this public domain every year.
And people do cool things with it all the time, or just make them available as ebooks trough Project Gutenberg or https://standardebooks.org/
So how about splitting a book into short chunks, illustrating some of them (VNs show you don't need new illustrations for each chunk), drawing the characters, and publishing it as a VN game?
I actually started a project back on Twitter to publish the whole of A demon haunted world – Science as a candle in the dark, verbatim, one tweet at a time. It was a bit of work to get the splits between all the chunks to be in the best spots, but it did work out quite well, I thought. Unfortunately I didn't get many followers, and so I gave it up after two or three chapters.
Anyways, the point is I know it's possible, and it's a lot less work than writing a book that stands the test of time 
I downloaded Ren'Py to see how hard it would be to make a visual novel, and it comes with a "game" which confirms that yes, it is a book! :P
I'm noticing that maybe the main problem with this idea is that many out of copyright texts are written in a way that can be hard to parse.
I had to read the first few lines of Lysistrata many times, and in two different translations, before I now finally feel kinda confident that I actually understand it.
Sure, there are often more modern translations, or updated language versions, of classics. But most of those are most likely still copyrighted!
So I guess what should happen here is not that some game maker (or just a random guy like me) makes a visual novel of a public domain text, but rather that a publisher should make their books into visual novels. Either books they've already translated/published, or even new translations of classical literature. Since they are public domain, no publishing house has any monopoly on them and can stop any publisher who wants from making a new translation or a visual novel.
@forteller You should check out the literary adaptation tag on vnsb for some examples of how people have adapted books into VNs! https://vndb.org/g1205
Most are more loose adaptations, but here's a few I can think of offhand that are pretty much just the text with art:
https://vndb.org/v20306
https://vndb.org/v1516
https://vndb.org/v25487
https://vndb.org/v16561
https://vndb.org/v10526
And https://vndb.org/v19420 has extra content/gameplay but includes a lot of the original novel text.
@forteller I see this a lot with books on Project Gutenberg. When I was into Sherlock Holmes (almost movie era), I found different spellings for many common words.
In nonfiction, there is a still somewhat relevant old Polish book about democracy: but the 16th century translation from Latin is mostly incomprehensible and a newer one is copyrighted.
Just like video games (with new hardware and control schemes), literature benefits from updates.